An Exotic Tick That Can Kill Cattle is Spreading Across Ohio

A species of exotic tick arrived in Ohio in 2021 in such huge numbers that their feeding frenzy on a southeastern farm left three cattle dead of what researchers believe was severe blood loss.

The scientists from The Ohio State University have reported in the Journal of Medical Entomology on the state’s first known established population of Asian longhorned ticks, and are now conducting research focused on monitoring and managing these pests.

So far, these ticks are not deemed to be a threat to human health. They tend to favor large livestock and wildlife, such as cattle and deer. Just a handful of the hundred ticks from the farm screened for infectious agents tested positive for pathogens, including one, Anaplasma phagocytophilium, that can cause disease in animals and humans. Elsewhere this tick carries another pathogen, Theileria orientalis, that affects cattle, and cases of bovine theileriosis have been reported in Ohio.

Researchers say the tiny brown ticks – the size of a sesame seed in some life stages and pea-sized when engorged – are persistent, however: Surveillance showed they returned the following summer to the farm despite the application of pesticides in 2021.

“They are going to spread to pretty much every part of Ohio and they are going to be a long-term management problem. There is no getting rid of them,” said Risa Pesapane, senior author of the paper and an assistant professor of veterinary preventive medicine at Ohio State.

“The good news about the ticks, though, is that most tick control agents that we currently have seem to kill them. Still, managing them is not easy because of how numerous they are and how easily they can come back.”

Asian longhorned ticks originate from East Asia and were first detected in the United States in New Jersey in 2017. When Pesapane joined Ohio State in 2019 as a tick-borne disease ecologist, the ticks were reported in West Virginia – meaning it was only a matter of time before they crossed the river into Ohio, she said.

She found the first of these ticks in Ohio, on a stray dog in Gallia County in 2020, and another was collected from a cow in Jackson County in June 2021. And then a farmer from Monroe County called Ohio State later that summer to report three of his 18 cattle, heavily infested with ticks, had died.

Source: osu.edu

Photo Credit: new-jersey-department-of-agriculture